“Socially or financially elite white people love to point out the activity and of catastrophically impoverished African Americans, which they pass off as if it were universally indicative of the fundamental nature or character of a heritage or a people. The same is true of many other marginalized peoples, and a current favorite of attack in the West is the loosely comprehended constellation of peoples from the Middle-East.

But here’s the problem. Catastrophically poor white people are just as stupid, dangerous, confused, and prone to conversion to cults and acts of extended violence as any other people are. The problem isn’t race, or culture, -it’s social class-, and pretending that the actions of a single social class provide us with a picture of the racial ‘identity’ of an entire people is approximately as sophisticated as pretending that a single encounter with “See Dick and Jane” entitles you to teach the analysis and composition of literature at Oxford.

People are actually people. Miseducation, poverty, disease, torture, and the other ‘ordinary’ pressures that the impoverished social classes face is the primary source of insanity and violence; not tradition, not race, and not appearance.”

— an a i